Get excited!

If you were just about to compete in a fixed-gear bike race, in the dark, in the cold, on a course with some very sharp turns and 30 or so other competitors, your nerves would show, right? At the Red Hook Criterium last year, the photographer Benedict Evans decided to find out. “The idea,” Evans, an avid cyclist himself, told me, “was to set up a kind of portable studio outdoors near the track, but it rained on the day, so I ended up renting the biggest U-Haul truck I could afford, covering the inside of it with black paper, driving it up next to the finish line and coaxing people inside it to be photographed. I figured that anyone willing to ride brakeless bikes around an intricate course in the dark of night would make for an interesting subject.” You can see some of his portraits here, among them that of Dan Chabanov, a bike messenger who has won three of the five races held so far…